cloud computing | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

How much did Vista really cost Microsoft?

Microsoft Vista’s failure hurts Microsoft today.

Microsoft Vista was the company’s despised stepchild – released way past schedule, clunky, slow and disdained so much by the market that PC manufacturers started offering “downgrades” to Windows XP to attract customers.

Despite the embarrassment, Microsoft retained its position as the world’s leading software company and does so today. But Vista certainly did hurt Microsoft and today’s marketplace shows the deep, long term effects of that damage.

Research website Asymco earlier this week looked at the ratio of Windows PCs sold to the sales of Apple Macs over the last 30 years. The ratio peaked at 56 to 1 in 2004.

Today that ratio is 18 and when phone and tablet sales are added in, the ratio is approaching 1:1. Apple has caught up.

It’s no accident 2004 is the peak of the Windows-Apple ratio. In 2004 Windows XP had matured after three years on the market, the older computers running Windows 98 or ME (another hated operating system) were being retired and a new version of Windows – codenamed Longhorn – taking advantage of newer technologies and with improved security was due to be released.

On August 27, 2004 things started to change with Microsoft’s announcement Longhorn would be delayed two years. This effectively broke the product roadmap that underpinned the business models of Microsoft and their partners.

To make matters worse, Apple were back in the game with their OSX operating system well established and a steady stream of well designed new products coming onto the market.

For consumers and businesses one of the advantages Windows systems had over Apple was the cost difference. The “Apple Tax” started to be eroded by the company’s move to Intel CPUs which delivered economies of scale coupled an aggressive program of tying up the supply chain with key manufacturers.

Then Longhorn – now known as Microsoft Vista – was released.

Despite the cheerleading of the Microsoft friendly parts of the technology media, consumers weren’t fooled. The product was slow and buggy with a new interface that confused users. Making matters worse was Microsoft’s ongoing obsession with multiple versions offering different features, something mocked by Steve Jobs, which further confused the marketplace.

Vista languished, customers decided to stick with Windows XP or to look at the faster and better designed Apple computers, and Microsoft’s market share started to slowly erode.

By the time Windows 7 was released Apple had clawed back their market position, launched the iPhone and caught the shift from personal computers to smartphones.

Probably the biggest embarrassment of all to Microsoft was the launch of the iPad, the market had been gagging for good tablet computer since the late 1990s and Microsoft’s partners had failed to deliver, partly because Windows XP, Vista and 7 didn’t perform as well as Apple’s iOS on the tablet form factor.

Microsoft’s completely blowing a decade’s lead in the tablet market is almost certainly due to the misguided priorities and feature creep that dogged Vista’s development. This is now costing the company dearly.

Asymco’s conclusion of Microsoft’s new market position is stunning and accurate.

The consequences are dire for Microsoft. The wiping out of any platform advantage around Windows will render it vulnerable to direct competition. This is not something it had to worry about before. Windows will have to compete not only for users, but for developer talent, investment by enterprises and the implicit goodwill it has had for more than a decade.

It will, most importantly, have a psychological effect. Realizing that Windows is not a hegemony will unleash market forces that nobody can predict.

Vista’s cost to Microsoft was great, it meant the company missed the smartphone surge, the rise of tablets and – possibly most dangerous of all to Microsoft – the move to cloud computing.

A lot hangs on Microsoft’s next operating system, Windows 8. Another Vista could kill the company.

Leaping seconds, new millennia

The leap second brings back memories of the Y2K frenzy

Along with a storm disrupting cloud computing services, last weekend also saw computer networks being disrupted by the leap second.

Servers needed to rebooted, websites froze and – as usual whenever there’s a technical glitch – airline check in systems fell over causing chaos for thousands for travellers.

It’s all very reminiscent of what we thought would happen with the Y2K bug. While sensible people didn’t think planes would fall from the sky, dams collapse and the world financial system grind to a halt (we had to wait another eight years for that), we did think there would be a lot of dumb little things to irritate us over the first few days of the year 2000.

That no real disruption happened, not even the airlines check in systems failed or tried to check in people for 1901, was credit to the entire IT industry. It a shame that the success in dealing with the complex unknowns of what was called the Y2K “bug” – which wasn’t really a bug but a feature – ended up being portrayed a scam by the entire IT sector.

A couple of years ago I was talking to a finance guy who claimed “the whole global financial crisis was a scam, just like Y2K.”

That view overlooks how the IT industry knew it had a problem and dealt with it, as opposed to the banksters and their friends in government who denied there was a problem right up to the moment it happened.

Of course it’s easy to ignore your business or industry has a problem if you know your friends in government will make sure your bonuses, holiday homes and private school fees will be guaranteed by the taxpayer, the taxpayers’ children and the taxpayers’ grandchildren.

Last weekend’s leap second and the cloud computing outage teach us that technology isn’t infallible and that things do go wrong.

For most of us when they do go wrong, we won’t have the government to bail us out.

This isn’t anything new. In any complex society, the unexpected can disrupt our comfortable way of living in ways we don’t expect. It’s something all of us should occasionally think about.

Is the Virginia storm outage bad news for cloud computing?

A disaster or an opportunity for the cloud computing industry?

On the eve of the US Independence Day holiday weekend, the last thing you need is a storm taking out your services. Unfortunately a storm across Virginia did exactly that to one of Amazon’s key data centres, taking with it popular social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest along with the Netflix movie service.

Having a key data centre going down and knocking out the services that rely on it surely exposes one of cloud computing’s greatest weakness – or does it?

Last week I spoke to Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security for Google Apps, who made the point “not all cloud providers are created equal”. The Virginia outage illustrates this.

Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram all made choices to solely rely on one data centre for key parts of their services leaving them exposed should a storm, earthquake or tsunami affect that location.

Eran introduced me to a term I hadn’t heard before – “shared fate zones” – a good example of which would be putting all your servers in Virginia where they can be knocked out by a storm, in California or Japan where an earthquake can disable them or solely around the Indian Ocean where a tsunami like that of 2004 could know them all out.

All the major cloud providers have the facility to spread loads across the globe for exactly this situation. The services affected by the Virginia storm chose not to do this and they eventually were caught out.

Events like this aren’t just an issue with cloud computing, or even technology in general. Storms, earthquakes, fires and many other natural or man made disasters are a fact of life which can disrupt business. If an earthquake hits your town, the question is how quickly can your business and customers get back to normal.

Distributing services is actually the cloud’s strength, it means we’re not tied to one office or location so we can get back to normal a lot quicker than those who have lost everything.

Computer networks being knocked out is nothing new, we’ve seen this plenty of times over the last fifty years as squirrels have chewed cables, technicians have pressed the wrong button or natural disasters have disabled data centres. By spreading the load, cloud computing services should make networks less prone to problems.

A lot of people will say in the next few days that Amazon’s outage illustrates the unreliability of cloud computing, it’s actually the opposite.

Deep mining business data

Big data means big opportunities for businesses prepared to look at what their customers are doing

This post originally appeared as Mining Business Data: Get ready to drill and excavate, the June 28, 2012 post on Smartcompany.

The IT industry loves buzzwords and the phrase coming into fashion is “big data”. Forget “social media” or “cloud computing”, much of what you’ll be reading about in columns like this over the next few years will be about mining the information piling into our businesses.

Big data’s power is illustrated in yesterday’s report that Mac users will pay more for hotels than those on Windows systems. So travel site Orbitz now plans to headline more expensive options to visitors using Apple computers.

While social media and cloud computing are falling out of favour, we shouldn’t discount those old-fashioned terms as they are two of the main drivers of big data. Cloud computing makes it possible to crunch data cheaply, while social media is generating even more data for people to play with.

Sydney business Roamz is a good illustration of how social media, cloud computing and big data come together. Born out of founder Jonathan Barouch’s desire to find local activities for his young child, Roamz pulls together data from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare to build a picture of what’s interesting in your neighbourhood.

It’s no coincidence direct marketing giant Salmat has invested in Roamz, as the data being gathered allows companies to paint a comprehensive picture of what their customers like.

Another business making sense of big data is Kaggle, set up by former Reserve Bank economist Anthony Goldbloom. Kaggle is a crowdsourcing service which runs data analysis competitions on business problems through to things like HIV research, chess ratings and dark matter exploration.

Like most things in the computing industry, these services were only available to those who could afford supercomputers a few years ago, today they’re available to anyone with a credit card and internet connection.

The era of big data might help us overcome Pareto’s Principle – otherwise known as the 80/20 rule – that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. We can also be sure that 80% of our problems come from a different 20% of clients.

Having the ability to crunch numbers quickly means we can identify the good payers and problem customers before we do work for them. It might also mean we beat another business truism by finally being able to identify the 50% of our advertising budget that is being wasted.

Even if you don’t think your business is ready to dive into the world of big data, it’s worthwhile at least having a look at your website analytics to see what your customers are looking at.

Who knows? Like Orbitz, you might identify those cashed up Mac users who love spending money.

Connecting the data dots

The age of big data means big opportunities

One of the connected world’s weaknesses is its fragmented as various silos of data appear in the different social and cloud services.

Bringing those sources together in a way that’s useful and relevant is one big opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Sydney company Roamz is one of the businesses looking at this opportunity by bringing together a user’s Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare feeds to figure what interesting stuff is happening locally.

Roamz’s CEO and founder Jonathan Barouch has a vision to “cut out the noise” from social media services by “curating and cleaning the data”.

The idea of curation isn’t new in the online world, this is probably one of the biggest challenges for everyone on the web as we find ourselves swamped with data. To date, much of the idea of ‘curation’ has been around news sources where services like Google News try to deliver relevant current affairs to the user’s desktop.

Social media sites are particularly in need of curation, particularly given your friends in Nevada are much help when you’re looking for a good coffee shop in Melbourne.

This is the problem Roamz seeks to solve and we’re seeing this with various other services, not least the social media platforms themselves as Facebook tries to extend its reach and Google attempts to integrate their local services with the Zagat restaurant review system and Google+.

Some would dismiss these services as “first world problems”, after all who cares about twittering hipsters trying to find a single origin, fair trade soy latte in Broadmeadows?

There’s a point in that view, although there is a much bigger problem for businesses in this fragmented data world in harnessing and validating various sources of market intelligence.

For businesses that get this right, they’ll be able to target advertising and marketing much more effectively while being able being able to tap into what their customers think and want.

It’s no accident therefore that one of Roamz’s major investors is consumer communications giant Salmat, who can deliver great value to their corporate customers through supplying this data and market intelligence.

The next IT buzzphrase is “Big Data” where businesses deal with this flood of information that is swamping all of us, by being able to understand customers and their behaviour things become far more efficient and cost effective.

Bringing data together and making sense of the results is the big challenge of our times, those who can solve the problem will be among the next generation of business leaders.

Mapping new industries

Can Google Maps Coordinate change the business world?

As smartphones become ubuiquitious in business, more applications are appearing that take advantage of the devices’ inbuilt features like GPS and cameras.

To date, many of these have services have been in consumer based, social media style applications but as the market matures, more business orientated services are appearing.

Google Maps Coordinate, the latest service from the search engine giant, uses a smartphone’s built in location services to track field staff and allocate jobs through an Android smartphone app.

On top of that, Google have added a Maps-style interface for businesses to schedule appointments and for staff to accept assignments.

It’s a nice but basic product that doesn’t really address any gaps in the marketplace with job scheduling technology being available for over a decade in the logistics and field service industries.

Connect2Field’s chief executive Steve Orenstein compared Google Maps Coordinate to his own product and while Steve is talking up his own company, the comparison does show this is a market that’s well catered for.

Given the market already has plenty of participants, it would make sense for Google to make the API available to existing players and profit from the rich data they can provide, that move might even give the edge to Android devices in an enterprise market that will become a two horse race if Microsoft fail to execute on Windows 8 and their tablet devices.

Unfortunately Google has chosen not to include these services into their enterprise API packages, leaving them competing against existing players rather than working with them.

At the moment Google Maps isn’t on a roll, having dropped their developer rates by 88% to deal with threat from Apple’s new mapping service.

Probably the biggest drawback to Google Maps Coordinate is its lack of integration with Google Docs, the increased siloing of Google’s operations makes the company start to resemble Microsoft and this is an issue Sergei Brin and Larry Page are going to have address lest the company find itself locked into the same inward looking stagnation.

While its difficult to see Google Maps Coordinate surviving in its current form given the nature of the marketplace, the trend in business orientated geolocation services is changing how companies work.

As smartphones take over the market and location based services become accepted, we’ll see more tools taking advantage of the business opportunities. For Google, this sector has huge potential and it will be interesting to see how they succeed in capitalising on their market dominance.

Managing your digital estate

What happens to our social media and cloud accounts when we pass away?

Everyone who goes online leaves “digital footprints“, a trail of the things we’ve done on the web. When you pass away, what happens to those status updates, comments and documents you’ve left on the Internet?

Dealing with the passing of a loved one is always difficult but today we have an added complexity of dealing with the online problems of social media sites suggesting people still “like” the deceased or valuable documents locked into cloud computing services.

With more of us storing information into cloud computing services, having important data locked away becomes a real risk and how online storage or software companies deal with deceased estates becomes important.

Online services don’t have a standard way of dealing with the data of someone who has passed away, here’s a quick sampler of some of the different policies.

Facebook

The social media giant has the easiest way to manage a deceased’s profile, simply fill in a form and swear you’re telling the truth. Facebook will then “memorialize” the account.

“Memorializing” is an interesting way of dealing with user’s passing. Rather than deleting the account, Facebook will lock out everyone but friends who are still able to post to the deceased’s wall. In some aspects, this is quite an elegant solution.

One of the features of LinkedIn is that it gives upfront suggestions of who should be in your network. If you’re a heavy user of the service, you’ve almost certainly encountered a suggested contact that is either inappropriate or distressing so the stakes for LinkedIn in keeping their contacts up to date is high.

LinkedIn’s process of dealing with a deceased’s passing is an email to customerservice@linkedin.com with the word “deceased” in the subject line. You need to give some details on the user’s passing and their account.

Google

With Google offering both social and cloud computing services, they are probably the most important service of all. Google’s requirements for handing over account details are rightly stringent.

Google’s procedure for deceased accounts involves the person first reporting the user’s passing to identify themselves first. Interestingly this has to be done by post.

Twitter

Like Google, Twitter requires anyone reporting a user’s death to mail proof of identity along with a death certificate. Once they are satisfied the user has passed away, they will deactivate the account.

PayPal

“When contacted in regards to a deceased estate we move quickly and with respect to close the customer account. Our policy and process is similar to many large financial institutions including banks When PayPal is notified that an account holder is deceased immediate steps are taken to suspend the account to prevent any unauthorised transfers from the account.

To close the account of someone who has died, PayPal needs to be sent paperwork including; details of the Executor of the Estate and a copy of the death certificate for the account holder. The documentation is reviewed and, once authenticated, the account is closed. If there are funds in the PayPal account, then these will be issued to the Executor of the Estate.

With bankrupt estates we refer this directly to our legal team who deal with them on a case-by-case basis and take action according to the instruction provided by the person or company handling the bankruptcy.”

Apple

No specific policy, the company recommends “customers needing guidance in relation to a deceased estate contact iTunes support at http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/contact/“.

Amazon

No clear policy. The company has been approached for comment.

Digital estate management services

There’s a number of services which help manage digital identities after someone passes away. Mashable reviews a number of these.

Sharing passwords

One simple solution is to share passwords with your next of kin, but that is a horrible security risk which isn’t recommended.

A slightly different solution is to split passwords in two and give half to different people, that still has risks and can get complex.

Probably the biggest problem with passwords is they change. Even if you write the password in your will or share it with trusted loved ones there’s a good chance it may have changed in the meantime.

Central email accounts

Probably the easiest, albeit still risky solution, is to have all online services pointing to one email address. almost every service has a “recover my password” feature which an executor or loved one with access to the central address will be able to recover most account login details.

Should everything else fail there are the courts and every major online service will obey a properly executed legal order although anything involving lawyers invariably ends up messy, difficult and expensive so that course should be the last resort.

As with everything online, balancing security, convenience and privacy is a difficult task for both individuals and companies. It’s not made better by the distress and grief when someone passes away.

Ideally we’d all plan these things and it would be easy on our loved ones although things often don’t turn out that way. It’s as true online as in any other aspect of life.

Towards the Zettabyte enterprise

The data explosion is here, are you ready for it?

Toward the Zettabyte Enterprise originally appeared in Smart Company on May 31, 2012

Two hundred years ago, the idea of equivalent power of hundreds of horses in a single machine was unthinkable; then steam engine arrived with what seemed unlimited power and that, followed by electricity and the motor car, changed our society and the way we do business.

Back then it was inconceivable that the average person would have the equivalent of several hundred horses of power in their household, today most of us have that sitting in our driveway.

The same thing is happening with the explosion in data, it’s changing how we work in ways as profound as the steam engine, electricity or the motor car.

A couple of surveys released this week illustrate the how business is changing. The Yellow Social Media Report 2012 and the Cisco VisualNetworking Index both show how business and our customers are adapting to having high speed internet at their fingertips.

The Cisco index illustrates the explosive growth of data across the Internet as more people in Asia and Africa connect to the net while users in developed countries like Australia increase their already heavy usage.

In Australia, Cisco see a sixfold growth in traffic between now and 2016. As the National Broadband Network is rolled out, they see speeds increasing substantially as well, with Australia moving from the back of global speed tables up to the front.

Many people are still struggling with the Megabyte or Gigabyte, but very soon we’re going to have to deal with the Zettabyte – a trillion Gigabytes.

For businesses, this means we’re going to have to deal with even more data, it’s clear our hardware and office equipment aren’t going to deal with the massive traffic increases we’re going to see in the next few years.

Even if we have that equipment, it’s another question whether we have the systems, or intellectual capacity to use it effectively.

The Sensis social media report shows consumers are expecting not just rich data but also 24/7 online services.

A worrying part of the Sensis survey is that businesses aren’t keeping up with these demands; something that jumps out with the survey is that while 79% of big businesses have a social media presence, only 27% of small businesses have bothered setting one up.

Australian small businesses have basically given the turf away to the big end of town.

The real worry with these statistics is that small business just isn’t taking advantage of the tools available to them — not only are they leaving the field open to bigger competitors, but there’s a whole new generation of lean new startups about to grab markets off slow incumbents.

While the big companies are vulnerable, it’s the smaller businesses who are the low hanging, easy to pick fruit. If you’re in a profitable niche segment this is something you’ll need to keep in mind.

In the near future we’ll be dealing with inconceivable amounts of data, the businesses that understand this will thrive while those who don’t probably won’t even understand what has hit them.

FUD on the Desktop

Can moving off Windows XP really save companies money?

“User productivity costs jump up a staggering 40 percent“, “return on investment over 130 percent over a three-year period” and an eighty four percent drop in IT support costs are some the latest claims from Microsoft in their campaign to wean users off Windows XP.

These, undoubtedly true, claims are pretty impressive and compelling for cash strapped IT managers, but do they really matter anymore?

With the rise of Bring Your Device policies and cloud computing, what operating system employees use is rapidly becoming irrelevant.

In large organisations that supply workers’ computers, most systems are run on SOEs – Standard Operating Environments – which means users have limited accounts and can’t install rogue software.

For those organisations wedded to supplying staff with desktop or laptop computers XP is fine and almost all of them are well advanced in their plans to redeploy to Windows 7 or 8 when the XP support period runs out in April 2014.

We’re seeing fewer organisations locked into the SOE model as the financial sums and business benefits of moving over to an employee Bring Your Own Device – BYOD – model start to look compelling.

Developing an SOE is a complex, time consuming task for an organisation – the package has to be tested to work on the company’s hardware which might include dozens of different types of printers, laptops and other devices. Then it has to be tested on all the software employees use.

In a big organisation developing new operating environments is not done lightly. It’s a complex, expensive process.

With a BYOD policy the company can develop a standard desktop environment that runs on a web browser. Staff can then bring their own device running on Mac OSX, Android, Linux or even Windows XP and, as long as their browser is up to date, they can run on the corporate network.

The IT department no longer has to care about what the staff member has on their desk and can focus on more important business technology issues – although sadly the password issue doesn’t go away.

For Microsoft, this evolution in corporate IT is a problem. Increasingly big organisations aren’t placing orders for big fleets of centrally managed desktops. The IT industry has moved to the cloud.

In a perverse way Microsoft are winning the desktop battle, most of those workers in companies implementing BYOD policies will choose Windows 7 or 8 systems because they are cheap and work well in a business environment. The problem is that’s where the profit no longer lies.

While we’ll see more FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt – about cloud computing, BYOD and Windows XP over the next year, the battle has been fought and won.

Increasingly Microsoft are looking like an exhausted army that has won an irrelevant battle while the real war has moved elsewhere.

The challenge for Microsoft is to find its way back to relevance in an era where the operating system doesn’t really matter.

The View From The Cloud

Where is the cloud computing industry heading and how does it affect businesses?

I’m presenting View From The Cloud this afternoon where we look at the results of SmartCompany’s technology in business survey.

The results are interesting, with nearly half the respondents saying they don’t use any cloud services.

Almost certainly, those respondents are wrong – they don’t realise many of the things they do on the web are cloud based. The 9% who nominated “they don’t know” are closer to the truth.

Those “unknown unknowns” are the big challenge for business managers and owners – those who think cloud computing isn’t being used in their organisations don’t know what their staff are up to with their laptops and smartphones.

Of those who are knowingly using cloud computing services, over two-thirds said they did so for the flexibility while just under a half appreciated the cloud services’ ability to grow with their business.

An encouraging aspect of the survey is how only a quarter of the respondents nominated price as being the reason for adopting cloud services.

This is an aspect of selling cloud computing services that has worried me for a while, that companies are commoditising their market by giving away free – or insanely – cheap services.

As always, price doesn’t drive the good customers and this survey illustrates that. Provide a good service at reasonable price points and the customers will come.

Business respondents also illustrated a mature attitude towards risks with cloud service with 61% concerned about data safety and half of that number worried about access issues.

An interesting part of the threat response was that 17% had other concerns about cloud technologies – including being tied to one vendor.

This is an interesting attitude which indicates people don’t understand the degree of vendor lock in that already exists in the computer world and why the majority of businesses are using Windows computers running Microsoft Word. If anything, cloud services are far more open than boxed software.

Vendor lock in though is a real concern and something that all cloud computing users should check before they, or their business, becomes too dependent on any one software package, consultant or online application.

Overall, the SmartCompany business technology survey is an interesting snapshot of where business is today with emerging trends and services. Join us at 12.30 to discuss the results.